


Free Company

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Comedy, F/F, Historical, Humor, I really don't have an excuse for this, Mildly filthy, dirtbag!Laura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 02:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10453128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: Dishonourably discharged cavalry officer Danny and fast-talking scoundrel Laura live an enjoyably debauched life in provincial Italy, surviving on their wits. But one day their world of dodging creditors, crashing card tables and seducing the local girls is interrupted by the discovery of a beautiful but inaccessible countess who drives both women into a frenzy of scheming.





	

Laura to the letter – Laura in the loop – Laura upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber! Figaro? Big deal. Laura would have sorted the quarrel, burgled the house, kissed the chambermaid and been out over the garden wall before Figaro finished polishing his boots that morning. Laura – which is to say _this_ Laura, this Laura recounting her tale to you this very moment, gentle listeners – Laura's a girl of the world, brave and strong and all kinds of righteous. For certain definitions of 'righteous', I'll grant you.

Curtain up, and the scene:

Sweet Bergamo in picturesque Lombardy where nothing, not even the frowning of the priests, disturbs the pursuit of pleasure. But under the surface of this placid provincial town you'll find mystery after mystery. For instance, just last year locals dozing in a side square were shocked to find a mattress falling out of a high window followed shortly by an extremely tall woman with her fists up and the dress uniform of an officer of the Hussars. Red hair cascading over her back, all in braid and emerald green, landing smartly as a gymnast – and cue the players.

Tumbling out of the house they come, a familiar romp of clowns to those of us here whose lives have been lived by our wits – to enumerate, one angry husband (wielding a poker, common variants include angry fathers wielding clubs); one outraged housekeeper (bustling); one shocked friar (Dominican); two servants (one short and fat, one tall and thin, both wheezing) and finally arriving a little behind the rest and significantly less angry, one semi-clothed woman clutching a tussled bedsheet to her flushed _décolletage_ and sighing after the disappearing heels of her escaping inamorata. Who in this case is evidently the flame-haired Amazon currently recovering from her self-inflicted defenestration.

“Stop her! Stop her!” they are all bellowing, but our soldier is more than a match for this, not her first scrape by the smartness of her fists. Three steps forward, a whirling turn of a waltz and the husband's lying on the flagstones and emasculated by loss of his poker. The housekeeper puts her chicken-catching skills to the test, but a shifting of sharp footwork in well-polished boots and she lands – safely, I am glad to see, for I'm not a heartless girl – on her back on the dusty mattress. The dashing devil blows her a kiss (round of appreciative clapping from the crowd, your Laura takes advantage of the distraction to purloin a couple of rolls from the stall of a distracted trader and shove them down her top) and she moves on.

But asthmatic though the servants may be and portly though the friar is, they've all got sticks and put up their guards, cornering her in the centre of a triangle. She flips her scabbard off her belt and into her hand, but all can see that it's quite empty and while a woman with a sword might have had a chance, a woman with only an empty sheath has none at all.

So in the brief interval we can all see where this afternoon's entertainment is going. Apprehension - hauling before the magistrate – imprisonment - some ghastly convent for the curing of wayward women from their unnatural appetites. But not on my watch, gentle listeners, for I early learned a love of justice and a girl of Dianic inclination has to stand up for her own. Nobody else wants to save the virago? Fine. I'll do it myself.

“What'd you do?” I shout at the cornered soldier, to get her attention.

“Mostly what her husband couldn't,” she shouts back, to a mixture of boos and cheers (the former perceptibly lower in pitch than the latter, as if you'd be expecting anything else).

One wink from me and she's caught on. The friar's on my side of the square, and she ostentatiously turns her back on him to confront the two servants, who gulp mightily at the prospect. Seeing as my unsuspecting opponent's a man of the Church I aim my kick at what he's presumably got no use for, the cry he gives out alerts the red-head, she thumps both the servants in their moment of shock and we're away, leaping long legs over the fishmonger's stall or in my case ducking beneath the baker's booth. Off we scarper, dodging the thrown vegetables and catcalls that are the customary applause in this most sophisticated of towns and we're landed safe in the rubble-filled rats-nest of alleys, breath heaving but very much free.

There's salted herring in my hair, but she tugs it out and leans in very close indeed while doing so.

“The food fight might have sucked, but I'm really glad I ran into you.”

And so on that fine sun-streaming day huddled in a corner out of sight I learn her name and she learns mine and she gallantly invites me out for dinner. No grubby dive inn with dodgy pies either, there's fifty ducats in her breeches plundered from her most recent paramour and so it's veal in wine and sage, and pike spiced with saffron, and great piles of frothy bread studded in jewelled fruit. And very much welcome too, listeners, for I'd been on short commons of late – result of which is that the talking was down to her, my mouth being otherwise occupied in conversing with the cake selection.

What a creature was this Danny Lawrence! Pride of the Hussars, commissioned in gallop-time, tipped for a captaincy, from sabre-tip to russet locks every inch the perfect cavalryman – save, I need hardly add, for the perfectly shaven face with not a gallant military whisker to be seen. And a devil with the ladies, too, envy of the callow recruits and grizzled veterans alike. But then _quelle horreur_! A promising career is torn away when a minor ailment gets Lieutenant Lawrence sent to the infirmary and the blushing medic has to report to the Colonel that she is, in fact and to whit and making no bones about it, a lady of the female persuasion.

And so she’s shuffled out as quick as can decently be with some story about an irregularity in the regiment accounts, and Lieutenant Danny Lawrence (discharged) takes up the life in which I found her. Still in her uniform but with her sword confiscated, she finds herself with no marketable skills save bad behaviour. And need I say she’s not the marrying type?

I like her, I really do. I am agog. I am tumbled head over my dusty and disrepaired heels. I am watching her increasingly admiring expression as we match each other glass for glass – halfway down a good cask of the finest Barolo and accelerating as the serving girl assumes a mask of horror at the sight. But no naïf, your Laura, she's worldly wise and perfectly aware that the dashing Lawrence has not thrown gold on the table simply that she might have an opportunity to express her thanks at a cordial distance. And while I'm very much up for attention from any lass who looks that good in a pair of trousers, it's a matter of pride that when affairs come to a head halfway back to her home, it's her who dizzily looks into my eyes and finds herself falling first. Although in the circumstances I'll confess I'm a pretty short second. Woman does _that_ with her tongue without any prompting, you hang onto her, right?

And by the time the morning light creeps into her disreputable and at this point rather sweaty lodgings we have decided. Danny gets to keep me (as she will insist on seeing it), or I get to keep her (which is rather nearer the truth, creampuffs). But either way the bargain is struck, our new lives begin and no doubt we make a fine pair for she’s as proud as the Devil, as bold as Harlequin and – though I say it as loves her – as cunning a scoundrel as ever lied her way into good graces.

She's a woman of the high life is my darling Danny, even if she does kip in a garret for want of the necessary grip with which to hold onto her cash. Easy come, easy go – a florin discovered in the flagstones becomes a ducat via a tavern wager becomes a whole bag of gold at the card table of Signora Belmonde's salon and we eat like queens for a week, fucking ourselves silly and cooling off with champagne. But what goes up must come down and so arrives the _passe_ that should have been _manque_ or the ace that should have been high and we're down to stolen bread and pawning the gilded buttons off her jacket.

Not that we ever went truly hungry, mind. If the card tables haven’t quite been keeping up their generous donations there’s always the markets to be relied upon. Such places they leave food lying around! Why, anybody could just walk off with it. Chicken legs _parfumé avec tarragon_ , legs of smoky ham, baskets of apples: no _haute cuisine_ maybe but better than humble pie. We need to keep our strength up.

For life opens its happy doors for us to in other means. Such fun we had with Elsie, sparkling delight of society, and Sarah-Jane down the fishmarket (we're no snobs, you understand, and bestowed our generous favours high and low, top and bottom and indeed everywhere else we could get our hands on). Even Betty the great prancing general's daughter couldn't resist the lure of my lubricated _langue française_ in her _bouche_ , and if we found to our inexpressible surprise that the end of that affair left a few jewelled keepsakes in my pocket – well, ‘tis better to have loved and lost and made a profit than etcetera etcetera.

And when things get a little sticky, as they do sometimes for the world can be cruel to us vulnerable girls, we’ve her right hook to depend on. My Amazonian angel can break a man’s jaw with one hand while holding a glass of vino in the other and _never spill a drop_. Which would be a criminal waste. 

So all is going swimmingly thank you very much, and if we’re living hand to mouth then at least we’re in deep with artful fingers. But then what do we find crossing our path but a little black cat, and who can ever remember if they’re good luck or bad?

Early one morning and still not to bed, Danny and I meander through a square to the sound of the dawn bell and the comfort of bellies full of brandy. All around us are the denizens of the dim light seen from the other end - the virtuous up for their morning orisons, bakers preparing the day, carts of meat and fish delivering up and down. But for us all of this is a drunken haze. And then I see my red-haired lovely staring open-mouthed, all a-goggle like a landed carp.

There, shepherded through the pallid streets is a young lady making a delightful picture. Dark hair bringing out the sombre shadows still lingering in alleys, but the most porcelain of complexions matching the gossamer mist clinging to the river – ah, _che bella_! Just the thing to warm me up of a cold morning, though _she_ can't be warm in that flimsy satin.

We take a moment to pause in our course _per ammirare la vista_ and Danny even does a little half-bow as she passes. Eyes right, she's seen us. Just a flick – the subtlest of movements, but a flick up and down before she's hurried out of sight by a veiled crone. 

The sun is breaking through the dozing mist and the brobdingnagian Lawrence sways back all of a sudden clasping her fist to her chest as if hit by something. For a second, you'd have thought the world stopped.

“I think I'm in love, Laura.”

Love? Now there's a word that barely passes the strawberry lips of Bergamo's most fragrant officer. She'll drop it in, mind, in a fairly impersonal sense when a quivering maiden requires a petal of romance to tip the scales of her defloration, but such things are no more lasting than confetti. Or for her dear Laura, of course she'll gasp it more sincerely into her pillow during the tight-knotted hours of the night - but this is the piping morning, despite which her heart's beating double-time for the advance.

Love? Not likely, I say to myself. Danny's got her knickers in a twist, not to mention soaked, over a passing fancy and overstates the extent and depth of her lust. She's headstrong like that. No harm in indulging it a little bit, long as she's affection left over for me. Plenty of room in those seven-league limbs.

“We must find her. We must.”

And always to muggins here to do the spade work. Well. If there's a girl about town in black satin there's a dressmaker and if there's a dressmaker there's a dressmaker's assistant, and if there's a dressmaker's assistant there's a boy who lacks discretion where a handful of silver is concerned. And that gives an address, a name, a few key details, and a half-bottle of Toscana that somehow I found myself with when returning bearing my prize. One eighteen hour workday later, allow me to introduce you to:

Carmilla Karnstein. She goes out once a week to Mass and most of the rest of the time is shuttered in the house with nothing at home save an inheritance she cannot touch and a crone of a stepmother guarding the gates. Beautiful, potentially rich if she ever marries - or perhaps more likely, if she ever stabs her stepmother. Lonely. Nobody knows anything else about her, and the matrigna so tight-fisted there's hardly a servant in the place to bribe save for a few grizzled retainers eating out of her hand. But some of the better gossips do know who her mother is friends with and where she might perhaps allow Carmilla to go for a rare evening out. So we bend our wits to the task – and not that we're geniuses or anything but I think we've got our breakthrough.

A great ball thrown by the Baron Vordenberg in his estate just out of town, some Teutonic bore who having exhausted the patience of everyone north of the Alps came south last year to create further yawning in Italy. Not the kind of party Danny and I frequent, his house being somewhat heavy on the faded merchants and music thirty years out of fashion and correspondingly light on the card tables and ladies of doubtful virtue but proven ability. But we're old troopers and can endure hardship if necessary.

So we straighten ourselves up, washing behind our ears and everything, and tramp off to do a bit of hedge-jumping. Danny jumps, anyway - I get tossed like a caber and end up in ivy-leaved déshabille. The estate is swollen fat, a rolling lawn studded with brooding cypresses around a Palladian monstrosity with ranks and ranks of identical rectangular windows all lit up from which drift the sound of a string quartet. We loiter around a bit by the front of the house where all the people and food are, acquaint ourselves with the lie of the land and the buffet, and grab a few glasses of bubbly before heading to the quiet rear of the place to consider our attack. A few genuine guests wander even here, but it's dark enough for skullduggery and anyway a lot of them seem to be engaged in their own escapades and pay us little notice.

There's a raised stone platform overlooking the garden and good Dame Fortune smiles upon us as she does on all ladies who trust her – ah, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! On the large stone balustrade, perched like a figurehead over the sea, is Carmilla. But like a thundercloud on a summer day, behind her looms a decrepit figure of an ancient dandified man. A peacock with but one feather left in his ragged tail, the Baron Vordenberg has come to bother the delectable contessa. In the muffled quiet of the back garden their voices carry down to our lurking spot in the shadows underneath.

“Vell don't you look like a virgin sacrifice?” His hands squirm and wriggle, worm-like, without ever quite touching her. She does not react and he presses. “Iphigenia tied to the rocks. You know, vhen I vas in the service of the Empress-Queen of Austria, ve had a saying about young ladies playing hard to get that-”

Beside me I can feel Danny tense her fingers into fists.

“Rescue her!” she hisses, and we are quite of one mind. The wheels start turning. The patio has a small set of stone steps to one side, leading directly down onto the lawn. Danny's eyeing it already, the call of bugles in her breathing and the promise of a bold charge to save the maiden in the tower. I restrain her for now. Dramatics later.

Instead I assume my best expression of over-awed adorability and skip over with hands behind my back to tug on his coat. “Um, excuse me Herr Signor Baron Sir? Um, Countess Lilita wants to see you.”

He beams down at me. “Ah, très charmant young lady. How kind of you to tell me, but I saw her not five minutes ago-”

“No, she said she had to see you again. She said it was about...” I do an eyebrow wiggle and his own eyebrows rise.

“Say no more. I shall return shortly, my dear Carmilla.” And he dodders away, with a kiss to Carmilla's hand and a vague pat on my head. I wait till he's out of sight and drop the obsequious face.

“God, how did you not die?” I roll my eyes and watch Carmilla reassess the situation. “Danny!” She appears from below and clicks her heels in greeting. Pretentious or what?

“At your service, contessina.”

Carmilla's face is only slightly less sour for us than for the Baron. “And to what do I owe the ride of the valkyries? Well, one valkyrie and one pocket-sized liar. Don't think I didn't see that. Although I suppose I'm grateful to be spared Methuselah's older brother putting on his dusty gallantry.”

Danny reveals the glasses of champagne picked up on out way through the garden. “We thought we'd bring the party here.”

“I came here to get _away_ from the party, genius.” She accepts the drink nonetheless, and how the glitter of the glass is made dull by her eyes. “This is the one place that makes this awful house worthwhile. I sneak out sometimes to look at the stars.” 

“Looking at the stars?”

“All that space and distance between them. They're free. They're beautiful.” She raises her hands to the heavens and I feel an unaccustomed tightness in my chest not entirely due to my assault on the buffet earlier. But she's smiling more gently at us now that we've proved our worth as providers of alcohol as well as removers of male attention, so we stumble over each others' words to make our introductions. And almost all of them within spitting distance of the truth.

There's a certain amount of very pleasing pink in Carmilla's cheeks warring with the green of envy as we discuss our lives. Danny's very keen to drop in her rank – she's a _Lieutenant_ , don't you know, not that she's got a right to the title – but judging from the flicking of Carmilla's eyes, she's more interested in the way Big Red is composed largely of leg. But she plays along nicely, and even affects to be shocked as we describe the way we got out of Betty's bedroom when the General came home. 

“And what kind of trouble do you possibly think you could get into here?”

“Oh, I have all sorts of ideas about that,” I offer, as if she hadn't deliberately provoked that response herself.

“God, Laura, what are we doing?” Danny's fingers begin their walk along Carmilla's shoulder.

I shake my head. “Haughty aristocratic girl, entirely too tightly wound-”

“Such a cliché.” 

“We ought to know better-”

“Gee, thanks,” mutters Carmilla, but there's sarcasm and interest and a whole lot of subdued amusement under it.

“And yet-”

“There's something about her.”

“Maybe it's my keen fashion sense,” she drawls.

I tug skeptically at the hem of her black dress, black on black and with black highlights. “It's definitely not that.”

“Says you with your fluffy sleeves.” She fingers my flounces. You look like you're about to flee your brooding lover across the moor.”

“Accurate,” comments Danny. “The fluffy sleeves thing. Not the brooding lover thing.”

“Yet.”

“What does that mean?” Carmilla asks.

“Maybe we feel like sharing you right now.”

Her decision comes slowly, blushingly to her cheeks. “I think I might like that very much.”

So things are proceeding very well and before long we're both acquainted with the taste of Carmilla's lips and I'm just trying to discover whether her dress has any easily unfastened bits when we are accosted.

“You! Get away from her!”

The Baron stands above us, stick raised like a sword.

“Unhand her, you braggart soldier and your cross-dressing little servant! I shall of course come to your defence Fraulein! Huzzah!” 

“Braggart?” Danny growls and up her fists go. “Bring it, starched collar.”

“Cross-dressing?” I ask, incredulous.

“Oh, you cannot lie to me, boy. I saw you insult the countess with your lascivious kisses the same as your ginger master. You, soldier, you should be ashamed to degrade your manservant so in aid of your own vicked debauches. Prepare to fight!”

Of course. He's a man of the old school is the Baron. 

“Yes, I should have seen at once. You make the most unconvincing girl now that I-”

He is cut off by Danny seizing his stick and planting a skull-cracking punch across his face.

“By all that's holy, Red!” Carmilla looks genuinely shocked.

“He shouldn't have insulted Laura,” she says by way of explanation, and I beam at her fighting for my honour - which is more than I ever do, gentle listeners. Other ladies present flowers to their beloveds, my Danny gives me the unconscious bodies of thoughtless men.

“People are going to notice.” Carmilla searches the garden for eyewitnesses. “Oh, Maman is not going to be happy, you do not want to see her unhappy. You two have got to go. Go now!” And nothing will do but that we beat a hasty retreat and end the night in our own bed.

But we had a kiss with a pretty girl, we drank some of the Baron Vordenberg's finest fizz, Danny got to punch a man – a decent enough evening all round, right? Now Danny's got the contessina out of our system she can get back to more pressing matters involving yours truly and removing the dress that really does make me look, for a rarity, like a virgin sacrifice.

But no. Bloody Lawrence has got her spurs in a twist. It was having to leave on somebody else's terms that did it, I swear she donned a male ego with her uniform and there's days now of low spirits and she's not drinking enough - barely a bottle a day. But you know, gentle listeners, there's a part of me that can sympathise. There really was something about Carmilla looking at the stars... but come now! Any more maudlin sentimentality and I'll be in the same state Danny is.

It's a terrible thing to see her like this, sighing and wistfully gazing at the honeysuckle peeking over the sill. She'll not gather up her spirits for cards (and how do we pay the rent now? I want to know), and the little pile of silver is running low indeed. Nor do her passions run high in other regions either, and my own temper's bottom of the proverbial dumps for lack of a good tumble. Not even a hint of leering when I artlessly forget to tie my bodice, she's so inattentive that Helen of Troy could turn up pink and flustered and she wouldn't budge.

And scraps of paper cluttering up the place – oh dear sweet Jesus and all his shiny saints, she's been writing poetry. They should ban romantic tales of dashing knights saving closeted princesses, they only give people ideas.

So: I reason. This is romance, which is desire heightened by unfulfilment. Now don't you go disapproving of my cynicism, cupcakes! Your Laura is no unfeeling shrivelled creature deaf to the calls of the heart. No indeed not, as you shall shortly hear. But she's a worldly girl and knows well the difference between sighing after a shadow on a balcony and loving a woman of flesh and blood and, incidentally, tongue as well. For do I not love my Danny? Well then. Let's have no more talk of heartless, but headless is another thing I ain't. Romance, as I say, is desire heightened by unfulfilment. Fulfilment, therefore, is the path out of this particular quagmire of feeling. Scheme, Laura, scheme!

All scrubbed and shining one night, Danny in her freshly-laundered uniform with empty scabbard clicking on the tight alley corners, and me tweaking the neckline of this great confection of a dress down to the appropriate level, we head to the opera. A bit shabby genteel, if all truth be told, gentle listeners: for all the starch on her coat, Danny's had to cut the cuffs close to hide the fraying and I've no petticoats to speak of, though I've found that the moment one is compelled to notice such things they're usually coming off in short order anyway.

The opera is teeming with the gradations of society, all stacked in stalls and boxes in strict categories of precedence. Danny and I, _personae non gratae_ as we are and impecunious to boot, lean on the most precipitous of railings in the gallery above the gallery, the waddling baritone below half concealed by a bit of pillar. But nobody comes to the opera to listen to music. Anyone who is anyone is watching each other, and anyone who's not anyone is watching those who are. And although most of these are hidden from us, those rich enough to get boxes are stealing in and out in a farce of opening and closing doors, pursuing their own intrigues between arias. 

The bass has just, to the baritone's horror, unveiled his plans for an unhappily arranged marriage when the boy who watches the theatre door comes to claim his reward and tell us that Contessa Lilita Morgan was seen stalking along the corridor not a minute ago. We relinquish the heartfelt scene on the stage and take the cue for our own entrance.

I insinuate myself into the box, smooth as a serpent. Carmilla is slumped in her gilded chair with one leg over an arm. She sees us – she starts to speak – she recognises us – she blushes very prettily. We have obviously made an impression.

“You again,” she purrs. 

But we are tongue-tied, gentle listeners. We are overcome with nervousness, suddenly the two women whose conquests have rampaged through the city have nothing to do but gulp in front of the raised eyebrow and the pouting lips like blushing brides who have somehow contrived to come without prior experience. But our beloved has her own forwardness as we'd discovered for myself that night in the Vordenberg garden and and from the spindly table with half-empty wineglasses and a plate of sugar biscuits she throws Danny the key to the box.

“Lock the door, Red.”

Just like that the spell breaks. There is tussling, locks clicking, curtains drawn over the box front, arms crossing and criss-crossing and much in the way of tugging at the hems of clothes. The whirlwind in our fingers strips us three bare.

The carpet's more than usually rough, so scattering the mediocre snacks to the floor and heedless of the crockery, we lay our feast of delicacies on the table, pausing only for a liberal few mouthfuls of the last of the wine. Danny and I take our fill of Carmilla, proceeding in good order though a half-dozen courses: cheek and jowl for appetisers, rump steak for a fine entrée. Finger food and tart titbits to follow, but a good cut of loin is the main course. Ah, gentle listeners, are you prone to blush? Should I circumlocute? Should I speak _en purpure_ and tell you with a myriad pretty words how we parted the delicate petals of her blushing flower, or that Danny found the molten core of her – or are your ears quite prepared to hear the honest and unvarnished truth that we simply applied ourselves with impeccable dedication to her cunt?

“Sing up!” I shout over my shoulder to the drawn curtains, and as if the orchestra and players had heard me, the opera soars into action. Nearer to home we're three voices in fine harmony, repetitive lyrics but the passion's there. “Fuck” and “please” and “more” and so on and so forth. Quite my favourite libretto, but then of course it's written by two of the masters of the art.

There is a banging on the door and Carmilla pauses just long enough in her desperate grinding to gasp out that we are discovered. Well then, listeners, there is nothing else for it but to double the tempo. No languid gratification of a sunny afternoon variety this, we're at it hammer and tongs for no good craftswoman ever leaves her work unfinished.

(Am I mixing my metaphors? Darlings, when you have perfume in your nostrils and heaving flesh in your hands and the taste of Carmilla on your tongue, you will not plan your rapturous recital by the canons of literary taste. So bugger off and go tell yourself a different story. This one's mine.)

“Carmilla Karnstein, open the door this instant!” screeches a harpy from outside.

 _Tua madre_ , sings Susanna on stage, unbelieving of this plot twist. _Mia madre_ , confirms the almost as befuddled Figaro, and the joyous sextet joins in to sound out the climactic celebration of the end of the second act as Carmilla arches her back and comes off bucking and crying in superb fashion to the thunderous applause of all the unseeing audience. Bravo, Danny, bravo! A virtuoso performance with just the right amount of vibrato.

But no encores tonight and the third act is postponed until further notice. The bashing at the door and the outraged demands of voices – one, I take it Carmilla's stepmother and one unmistakeably the Baron Vordenberg – to be let in and told what's causing such a commotion are growing greater. This opera box is hardly built for security.

“Quick quick, Danny!” I cry. “Oh Carm, there's no time! Yes, kisses to you – and to you again, here and, fuck it, there as well if you insist but there's no time! We'll catch you up. Danny, _clothes!_ ”

For the uniform-proud Lawrence is struggling with the endless shiny braid fastenings on her jacket, and those high-waisted overall breeches need some serious tugging on – an activity I'm usually more than happy to help with, along with the accompanying pauses to get a mouthful of her militarily pert rear, but this is hardly the time. For me, _sans_ petticoats, it is but the work of a moment to wriggle back into what I barely had time to wriggle out of.

The door bursts open and matters come to a head. I shout an instruction and Carmilla – smart girl – is already wrenching back the curtains that until lately hid our doubtful and compromised modesty. The Baron and a shrieking Gorgon of a woman with bared teeth are in the doorway and over we go, vaulting out of the box and into the stalls below.

Fortunately, as the quick amongst you will have divined, our escape coincides with the interval after the second act and we land safely in a more or less unoccupied region of seats. But crowds are milling around and how to dodge the ones already hurrying to cut us off?

“Fire!” I shout to the crowded theatre, “Fire! Run for your lives! Fire!”

The murmuring of confusion as to why two imperfectly-dressed young ladies, one of them wiping her mouth off, have descended in short order from a curtained box gives way to a panic. Out they go, canes and bonnets abandoned, servants bearing drinks trays dropping their wares in terror as the stampede away from the imagined inferno sweeps out into the streets and Danny and I are carried along disguised in the torrent.

And safe once more in the rats-nest of alleys. What with one thing and another, I never have discovered how that opera ends.

But we return home in merry spirits and relieve in our hearts the sound of Carmilla's sighing as we unite ourselves as two once more. An energetic night, a long lie-in the next morning and all's well. Except in the blooming dawn I wake and stretch my arms out to take hold of my two girls and then, sleep falling from my eyes, remember there's only one of them. The way my heart sinks, you'd have thought I'd found the bed empty! 

Carmilla's on my mind – the way her eyebrows arch, the pout of her lips, the heart-stopping purr in her voice. Ah, I am smitten, and Danny's eyes that morning have a look of longing in them that speaks of the same turmoil in her own breast. So look where my proposed cure for Danny's ills got us - she's tumbled red-head over heels doubly more than previous. Then to add complication to complication, that barbed arrow Cupid so precisely shot at her has not only failed to get its hooks out of her heartstrings, but it's gone straight through her and into yours truly. And without the slightest drop in my beating passion for Lieutenant Lawrence, either.

We must, it seems, recruit the lovely Carmilla for our company or never have a moment's peace of heart again.

Reconnaissance does not indicate an easy advance. The girl who delivers bread to the Karnstein place tells me for an extortionate quantity of cash that poor Carmilla is in disgrace and has been shut up even tighter than before. Or at least she's in disgrace within the household – the story that's come out to be gabbled in the taverns and alley corners of Bergamo is that she's in seclusion to pray for guidance during the nervous weeks before her recently arranged marriage to one Cornelius Hans Albrecht, Lugenbaron von Vordenberg.

Rarely has my heart been moved to such pity and determination. To marry that thing! To be bedded with it! I mean the odds are high that he'll not be flying his standard any more than half-mast at his age, but even so that's a cruel fate for such a delicious creature as she. The old scheming mind bubbles over, a fever has gripped me as hard as the doldrums have gripped Danny. Every hour spent scratching my head is an hour Carmilla must peek out of the slats in her shutters for the merest glimpse at the remote stars.

“Boots on, Red.” I give Danny's rump an affectionate slap when the shape of a plan has arrived. “I found you some new clothes. Come on, up you get!”

She rolls further into the tangle of sheets and gives me a look. “I'm not in the mood for dress-up games today, Hollis.”

Dirty mind, that woman. 

“We're going to church, Danny. Now get up or I'm finished with you. And put on this doctor's gown. Oh, and you get to hold the sign.”

But before the doctoring and the sign holding it's an unaccustomed jaunt to Mass to inveigle ourselves in a suitable pew – far too far from the en-veiled and closely watched Carmilla, sandwiched between her gargoyle of a stepmother and the doddering Baron. But near enough to apply a bit of elbowing when it's time for Communion and slip a piece of paper into the prayer book she leaves behind in her place.

Then to the great square outside the Karnstein _palazzo_ there to ply our wares. Trailing black gowns, supercilious expressions, hair carefully bundled out of sight under skullcaps:

_Bartolo and Basilio, Doctors Extraordinary, Graduates of Bologna. Hopeless cases a speciality._

Lots of coloured water in little bottles to sell to anyone who gets too curious – not a bad job either, and if this day's exercises don't quite come off as they should we may have a profitable new area of business to enjoy. But we've barely been there an hour when a piercing shriek rings out from the mansion before us, the door flings open and Lilita Morgan tumbles into the street with a look of desperation.

And she collapses straight into our arms. How fortunate to find you here! My daughter – lying on her bed. Knife in her chest. Blood everywhere. Oh, the horror! The inconvenience! The possible expense!

We gather around the bed where our lady love is lying still as a bone, a gore-stained knife clutched to her chest and a red-spattered dress. My heart turns over in my own chest – for the two seconds it takes me to lay a hand upon her breast and feel its subdued but calm rising and falling. I suspect there's a rare steak or two gone from the kitchen.

“Dead as a doornail, this one,” I declare breezily, and Danny makes a show of taking her pulse before agreeing. “A severe case of _mortuus con gros sanguo_. You need an undertaker, not a doctor.”

“But she's warm!”

“The body takes longer to cool than you expect... um, _rigorous mortis oddly thermidor_ ,” I add.

She seizes Carmilla's wrist. “There's a pulse!”

“That's your own you're feeling. Common mistake when you're excited. They give you special exercises in medical school to avoid that. No, she's quite dead.” I pat her delightfully soft bosom for emphasis. “Bartolo, we'll need to clean her up a bit before the undertakers get here. You know what they're like. Contessa, you may want to leave. The following scene may be distressing for those of a sensitive disposition.”

There's a commotion outside on the staircase and Lilita is at once pulled into a hurried argument with the voice of the Baron.

“Is she-”

“No. No, Vordie. Bereft of life she rests in peace.” There was a certain dryness to her voice now that no outsiders were present to see her lack of tears. Frankly, listeners, she sounded no more than mildly irritated at the death of her ostensibly beloved daughter. 

“Ve'll have to hurry the wedding forward, then. Ve can go-”

“Vordenberg. She's dead. She's not going anywhere. I'm afraid it's all off.”

“I don't mind the stiffs,” Vordenberg protests, sensitive of his dowry. “Ve can keep going!”

“She's _dead_ , Baron! She's gone to join the bleeding choir invisible!”

“Vell yes, 'tis pity she's a corpse, but no marriage is perf-”

“She'll be mouldering by the ceremony-”

“She'll vear a veil, put on some perfume. Listen, ve have a deal. I marry the girl, I get her money, you get half vith your own name on the bank account for once. Or would you prefer it all to go to that cousin in Milan?”

The stamping and hissing disappears away downstairs and with the coast clear Danny bends over the bed to kiss our sleeping beauty on the lips. What magic, for her dead eyes open and she's enough life in her to take Danny's lip between her teeth and kiss back with more than usual vigour for a cadaver.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You'd best get me out of these bloody clothes, sweethearts.”

The room is scented with Carmilla's flesh and I can smell Danny's so familiar skin from close behind her and, to put it delicately for those of finer sensibilities, here's a dish of so splendidly combined ingredients that I'm quite salivating at the thought. The moment the door's locked, no teasing flirtation this time before we get to business, we've matters to finish off from last time when we were so rudely interrupted. Up against the wall she shoves me and, _belissima_ , for a young lady kept so firmly from entertaining company she fucking well knows how to use her fingers. 

My own reprise of our famous choral trio is somewhat drowned out by the importunate reappearance of Lilita Morgan who lets wail with incredible volume at the sight of her recently dead stepdaughter burying herself between the thighs of one of her doctors while the other has lost her gown to reveal a gold-braided pelisse. Because of course the Countess had a spare key, it's her own house this time.

“Murder!” she cries, “Thievery! Rapine! Adultery! Summon the Watch!” So the plan of sneaking Carmilla out of the window while her matrigna's out getting an undertaker has fallen through. Fighting it is then, and we've an expert right on hand.

“Not sure all of those are _quite_ accurate there,” Danny says, drawing herself up. It really is one of the most attractive things about her that she can look so dignified even uncovered, naked, _desnuda_ , bare and frankly starkers. It's the quality of her back muscles that do it. “Nobody's dead, after all.”

The two circle each other, while I try to get this damned doctor's gown either properly on or properly off in a conducive-to-running kind of a way.

“Vordenberg!” she shouts and we're darting glances at each other trying to think our way out of this one. But my dear Carm, eyes sharpened like knives, launches herself into a sprint from a standing start and topples her stepmother backwards and head first out of the window.

There is screaming from outside and hurried grabbing of clothes inside, but there are steps coming up the stairs, faster than we though possible and while-

“Stand aside everyone!” bellows the Baron, “It is I!” His rapier is out and in this confined space we'll not make it out of the room without coming in his reach. Carmilla screams at the sight, Danny lunges for the first thing that might manage as a weapon.

Wild-eyed, he may be a dotard but greed drives him mad. He swings, he swipes, and even Danny duelling with a grabbed candlestick is hard pressed to keep him away from gutting our at this point rather exposed skin. 

“When I marry the countess, I shall give her a present and it will be _your severed head_ ,” he hisses.

At which point a crowd of concerned citizens led by a fine young officer of the watch - fresh from having observed the fall and death of Lilita Morgan from her own window - smash their way in through the door in full rescuing mode and behold three terrified (we're quick on the uptake, mind, and drop all ersatz weapons as fast as can be) girls being menaced by the sword-wielding Baron Vordenberg, along with a pile of bloody sheets in the very room the now late Countess fell from.

“Oh, schnick-schnack.”

They clear the conclusion from a standing start. And everything sorted out in very good order. Dead body shuffled off to the undertakers, Baron hauled off before Magnifico in chains and all that's left is for Carmilla to refuse the dozens of offers of accommodation, guardianship or strategic dynastic marriage that appear within minutes of the scheming nobility catching onto the fact that she's single and unspoken for.

“I shall not!” she protests to each concerned potentate and the magistrate in turn when he comes round to see what's occurred. A good impression of tears filling her eyes – full marks, Carm! “My beloved mother is dead. I am the last of my family and it's my estate now. I shan't leave it. And if you worry about a vulnerable young girl's safety – why, these two dedicated friends will be the watchful companions guarding my virtue henceforth, and I shall keep them very close indeed.”

And so the happiest part of our life yet has dawned, dear cupcakes. There are a few smothered grins from certain ladies of the audience who might recognise Danny and I, but for the most part all the serious and sober men with golden chains around their waists and souls nod seriously and soberly and offer the new Contessa their commiserations on the death of her noble mother.

Danny and I are paragons of patience as they are slowly sent away. And when they are gone we – well no we _don't_ , actually, for there's plenty of time for all that later. No, we throw open all the windows to let in the sunshine and the spring and the sound of musicians in the square and the smell of flowers in the air. For we've retired, Lieutenant Lawrence and I, time to grow domestic and self-satisfied, time to spend long mornings lying in the sun, time to tangle the perfect curls that frame Carmilla's face for hours and days and years more to come.

And so, gentle listeners, may all your lives be full of joy and may all your glasses be full of wine and may all your loves - however many you may have at once – be as clever, witty and downright cunning as our own unbound, unfettered and entirely free company.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do not ask why nobody in eighteenth-century Bergamo seems to have an Italian name, okay? Some things in fanfic just have to be accepted.
> 
> I also confess to the small inaccuracy that the part of The Marriage of Figaro being played during the opera scene is actually in the middle of the third act rather than the end of the second, but I beg to be allowed some latitude for dramatic timing.


End file.
